Issue > Editor's Note

Editor's Note

The Cortland Review dedicates its Issue 74 to the memory of Thomas Lux: 1946-2017.

"River of Forgetting," Mira Gerard's cover contribution, "is based, Mira says, on the Greek myth of the river Lethe, in Hades. The Greek word for truth is "alethea" which literally means "un-forgetting." "I was thinking," she says, "about the way that sadness causes us to forget, to un-remember and, therefore, go away from the truth."

Mira earned her BFA from Indiana University in Bloomington and her MFA from The University of Georgia in Athens. Mira makes paintings of the figure as a way to understand desire, and her work is informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, the practice of speaking freely without preconception. "Psychoanalytic discourse and painting," she says, "both allow for impulses, slips and interventions of the unconscious to emerge and interrupt the picture or story being conveyed." Would you agree that happens in a Thomas Lux poem, too?

Widely published and exhibited, Mira lives and works in Johnson City, Tennessee, where she is Chair and Professor of Painting at the Department of Art & Design at East Tennessee State University.